Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
Father Don Wolf, a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, offers a Catholic perspective on the issues confronting each person today.
Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf
The Pope's Authority: Understanding Papal Infallibility | May 11, 2025
In this episode, Father Wolf unpacks the widely misunderstood doctrine of papal infallibility, explaining its actual meaning, historical context and importance in preserving Catholic teaching through generations.
• Papal infallibility is a relatively new doctrine formally defined at the First Vatican Council (1869-1870)
• The doctrine only applies when the Pope officially teaches on matters of faith and morals
• Infallibility does not mean whatever the Pope says becomes true; rather, he teaches what is already true
• We all operate with "infallible" certainties in our daily lives – from family relationships to scientific truths
• Historical context matters: the doctrine emerged during a period of intense skepticism about religious truths
• The teaching function is central to the Church's mission – from the Pope to every faithful Catholic
• Infallibility serves as a protection against relativism while maintaining the core teachings of the faith
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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.
This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolfe. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time, discovering God's presence in our lives and finding hope in His Word. And now your host, father Don Wolfe.
Speaker 2:Welcome Oklahoma to Living Catholic. I'm Father Don Wolfe, pastor of the Parish of Sacred Heart in Oklahoma City and rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. Now that so much conversation swirls about the Pope and the selection process of the papacy, I thought it would be a good time to talk about the issue almost no one understands, which is the doctrine of papal infallibility. Even experts end up stumbling in their explanation and understanding of this topic. Since we're going to be hearing a lot about the Pope in the coming weeks, we should know what the church actually teaches when it comes to all this. The first thing to note is that this doctrinal definition is relatively new. It was elaborated at the First Vatican Council 1869 to 1870.
Speaker 2:Lots of people in the media know little, and care even less, about the ins and outs of church history and belief, but it's a real advantage, though, for all of us to know something about the details of church life, and most of the time when infallibility is mentioned, it's presumed that Catholics believe that whatever the Pope says must be the last word when it comes to the life of the faith. After all, papal infallibility quote unquote is a distinctive teaching. If the pope is infallible, then we've put our eggs in one basket and we have every right to presume that what he says goes. It certainly makes the process of selecting a pope truly important, as well as making the life of the faith a matter of some real gravity. After looking at all those men processing into and out of the Sistine Chapel for the papal conclave and imagining we're supposed to believe what they tell us, the life of faith can look pretty rigorous. But of course there's a lot more to it than simply hearing the Pope's words and getting ready to do whatever he says. If only it were that simple and that straightforward. More than one pope has wished that his words were heard and acted on with such understanding and with such alacrity.
Speaker 2:I've always fantasized that when the pope wakes up in the morning in his apartments, surrounded by the beauty and history of St Peter's and it doesn't matter which pope it is he thinks this one thing. In his opening moments of the day, he thinks if I just had some power around here, some real power, I could really get things done. But as it is, I can only do what I can do, which is another way to say that infallibility is not exactly absolute supreme power ready to be exercised at a moment's notice and about every topic. No, there's a lot more to it than power and authority and, as a preface to the definition of papal infallibility, most people are actually quite well aware of the doctrine of infallibility because they exercise it all the time.
Speaker 2:Most people operate their lives according to their understanding of the world, which they hold to be absolutely true. They might have a lot of concerns about what's going on in their lives or what's happening in the world, which they hold to be absolutely true. They might have a lot of concerns about what's going on in their lives or what's happening in the world, but they know there are some bedrock, incontrovertible truths that they are sure of. Without question. This may sound a bit exaggerated that people believe the truths of their lives without hesitation, but it's important to remember. All of us operate that way. We wouldn't know how to get along in life if we weren't infallibly certain about the bedrock essentials of our lives. For example, I am certain that the person everyone pointed to and told me was my father was, in fact, the man who sired me. That person, that other person who cooked and cleaned and taught me how to treat other people, was, according to what I was taught my real mother. I am as certain of those facts as I am of the sunrise. Were someone to agitate me by insisting these facts were not true, I'd not only ignore them, I would work to convince them otherwise. I've operated according to these facts all my life. I defend these truths to the last moment, but not just questions of blood and loyalty.
Speaker 2:Infallible truths are a lot more intricate. I believe that the sun is a superball, hot of hydrogen, and not a torch carried by Helios across the sky in his chariot. Others may have believed differently at different times in history, but I believe this modern, comprehensible version. I believe it to be an infallible truth that our sun is a star like other stars shining in the universe, warming and energizing our planet. I also believe there is a power called love that moves through the lives of people and provides them with meaning and purpose. I believe that charity is a power called love that moves through the lives of people and provides them with meaning and purpose. I believe that charity is a power greater than mere personal chemistry or hormonal interactions.
Speaker 2:I am infallibly certain that numbers exist and the thoughts about their relationships to one another, among their interoperations, are helpful in describing and understanding our world, and on and on. There are truths I know and that I teach with infallible certainty. In fact, if I were to begin every description, in every moment, with absolute skepticism, believing there was nothing that could be true or could be said to be true, I wouldn't get very far in life. The truths that boiling water on the stovetop will burn you, that a sharpened knife can cause you pain and that jumping off of a high roof can kill you these are not only helpful to know. They're purposeful in getting along in life. Being skeptical about their truth won't just keep you from good conversation, it could likely get you killed. Infallible truths and infallible teachings are an aspect of the world for most of us.
Speaker 2:Think of the sports movies you've seen over the years. One of the dramatic plot lines of the most famous ones is that of the coach who's trying to teach his players how to win. The players get used to their way of doing things, and when the new coach arrives, he immediately begins to teach them an entirely new way to look at the game, because he has an insight into how to win they haven't seen yet and he wants to teach it to them. The coach insists on his way of doing things. He not only insists that the players follow his instructions, he presumes his way is the infallible prescription for making everyone better. Eventually, according to the plot line, the guys begin to see their coach understands what they do not and his teaching is credible. But they can only get there by trusting his infallible view of things. Once they place their trust in this vision, they win. Nobody has a problem with such a plot. We've seen it a hundred times in a hundred movies.
Speaker 2:Infallibility isn't just a Catholic thing and it's not a funny faith thing either. It's actually how we get along in life. Believing in the infallibility of the Pope isn't all that different than we're used to in our everyday lives. We don't think much about it and we certainly don't ever talk about it. But it's true. We get along by presuming the truths we intuit and the ones we live with are the cornerstones of our lives. So now we get to the heart of the matter.
Speaker 2:The infallibility of the Pope is a doctrine that maintains that the Pope is inerrant when he's teaching the truth of faith and morals. Notice that it is a restricted definition. That's the most important element of the doctrine. It does not cover any old thing the Pope might say or any opinion he might have concerning one thing or another in life. Only when the Pope is officially teaching the content of faith and morals does this doctrine apply. When the Pope teaches the faith, he's inerrant. Let me say that another way. When the Pope teaches with regard to faith and morals, what he says is infallibly true. And it is infallible not because his saying makes it true. It's infallible because what he says is true. I'll say that again. It's not true because it is the Pope who says it and his saying. It guarantees the truth. The truth is in what he said. The Pope teaching it doesn't make it true. The Pope says it because it's true. I know that may sound convoluted and complicated and to a certain extent it is, but it comes from a time in the life of the Church in the Western world in which everyone was concerned about the integrity of the faith.
Speaker 2:Over the previous century, all kinds of progress had been made in historical understandings about how new ideas are encapsulated and handed on over time, including how documents can be altered or misunderstood and re-understood over the passage of time. Those insights were especially applied to the interpretation of Scripture and to the teachings of the Church. In fact, it became quite fashionable to begin to presume no one had the capacity to pass on any information or understanding in an intact way. Have a couple of scholars get to work on any subject and pretty soon the subject was taken apart and reassembled and became something no one could recognize. Everybody understood there was a value in such an exercise. One could recognize Everybody understood there was a value in such an exercise. Just spend some time looking over a high school history textbook from, say, 60 years ago, as they explained the Civil War, compared to books today, and you'll see that the books from generations ago deliberately left out a good deal of important information. Looking back and critiquing what we see is helpful and valuable, but of course there's a limit. After a while, after digging at the foundation to analyze it and describing it and scrape away the layers, the whole building might come tumbling down. That's the challenge facing everyone.
Speaker 2:There's a joke that made its way around the classroom when I was studying scripture in the seminary. It captures the weakness of the work we were doing, which was very much tied to this forensic examination of the portions and pieces of the New Testament, trying to understand the documents and what was essential and what was secondary. In its own way, the work we were learning to do was fascinating, but it did tend to wear away at some of the supports for the life of the faith. It was the way everyone thought we should be exposed to the life of the Bible and the heart of rigorous study about the faith in our time. So it is what we did. But the joke is this A reporter goes to a gathering of biblical scholars who are gathered in the cafeteria to tell them that the burial spot of Jesus has just been uncovered.
Speaker 2:And as they uncovered it, they found the body of Jesus in the tomb. All examinations show that it was in fact the body of Jesus of Nazareth. No question about it. The reporter wants to know what the scholars think about the fact that, with this new discovery, there was no resurrection from the dead, no appearance of Jesus to his disciples, no mission to the nations and no proclamation of hope and certainty to those who trusted in salvation. What do you think about the discovery? The reporter asks the most famous, the most prominent New Testament scholar, who published two dozen books about the Gospels. And the scholar responds what you mean? Jesus actually existed. Spend enough time dividing the faith into small enough pieces and pretty soon there's nothing much left. At least it's hard to put the pieces together again in a way that makes sense of anything. That's the troubling aspect everyone was dealing with as this way of study and analysis was making its way in the world.
Speaker 2:The church was challenged by all of this Scholars everywhere and then eventually, ordinary people who kept up with these things. They began to doubt it was possible. The church had the capacity to teach the faith. The informed and the clever began to wonder if it was possible. The church had the capacity to teach the faith. The informed and the clever began to wonder if it was possible that the faith would be anything more than a sort of common compact we entered into together to believe whatever we wanted to believe. The faith of the church was a kind of constitution we all voted on, not a revelation of the gift of God to us for our salvation.
Speaker 2:This was exemplified in the thinking of, of all people, thomas Jefferson. He was convinced the scriptures and the teachings of the church were remnants of an old, befuddled pre-scientific age that had nothing to say to anyone like him who was sophisticated and up-to-date. The breakthrough scientific understanding of his time simply made the heart of the New Testament obsolete. And remember this was before the discovery of germs, atoms, electricity, electronics, radiation, dna, the circulation of blood, antibiotics, novocaine and vitamins, among a thousand other things. So much for Jefferson's sophistication. So he, having grown up with the New Testament as part of his life and education, went through his copy of the Bible and razored out any of the passages in which Jesus performed miracles or identified himself as the Son of God. All these things weren't very scientific, he told himself, and so Jesus really couldn't have done them or taught them. In his mind, he was rescuing Jesus from the obsolescence of old thinking. Of course, by now we know there was nothing more old thinking than Jefferson in many ways that we'd been embarrassed to try to defend.
Speaker 2:But the heart of his project was the perfect example of the energy of his time. He wanted to save the New Testament by tearing it apart. He wanted to destroy it in order to save it. Such energy was at work with all of the doctrines and teachings of the church. Faithful shepherds were asking themselves how the church was to survive in the midst of such a corrosive dynamic. Put enough acid on the ropes, tying things down, and pretty soon. There's nothing holding anything, especially if the seas are rough and the ship is bobbing on the waves.
Speaker 2:The church's response was to empower the definition of the church as a teaching church headed by the pope. Now there are two very important elements in this hidden of this, hidden inside of the definition of papal infallibility. And the first is that the church is a teaching church, that is to say, the church exists in order to embody and to pass on the life of the faith. The faith we receive is given to us so that our lives might reflect what we receive and so that our lives might be the conduit for passing it on to others. We're like a live electrical wire. When it's charged, it's charged everywhere and the electrical current in the wire is present everywhere. It's not the case that the wire is charged at one place and not charged at the other. Either it's wholly charged or it's dead. It's the same with the life of the faith Either the church is enlivened and embodies the faith or it doesn't. There isn't one part that is and another part that's not. Passing the faith on is analogous to electricity in the wire it's flowing or it's not. There's no other option. Church life exists in order that the faith is charged and flowing or it's dead.
Speaker 2:This is often spoken of unhelpfully in my view as the magisterium of the church. What's often meant by this is that there is the teaching of the church that's passed on to the next generation, and we use the word teaching as a gerund. That is, it is the noun used to describe all the stuff that is taught the propositions and truths and prayers and actions that are the faith. Many times it is imagined as the curriculum we'd have if we were in charge of giving a series of classes about the church. Here's the teaching of the church, we'd say. And we in charge of giving a series of classes about the church, here's the teaching of the church, we'd say, and we start and go through one thing after the other. It would end up looking a lot like the combination of the Bible and the catechism.
Speaker 2:The magisterium of the church is what the teaching is, as well as the structure around that teaching that make it authentic. There is an authentic teaching and this is what it is and this is how we know it is authentic. That's what most people mean when they say magisterium, but it's not that. The magisterium isn't simply the propositions and the authority of the church. All those things are important, but they miss the original point.
Speaker 2:The teaching of the church is that the church is teaching. It's the action of embodying and passing on and living the life of Christ in the church. That's the teaching of the church. It's the action, not just the content. To that extent, the first communion teacher helping her second grade students say amen to when the minister says the body of Christ is part of the magisterium of the church. In fact, that teacher will probably have more impact on the life of the average believer than the bishop in his diocese or a cardinal at work in Rome.
Speaker 2:The church teaching. That's the heart of the teaching of the church. The second element hidden is that when the Pope teaches, he's acting to fulfill the bedrock expectation, the fundamental aspect of what the church is for. He's not just settling an argument or clarifying some point or quieting some critic. When the Pope speaks concerning the life of faith and morals, he's engaged in the heart of the life of the church. A Pope who does not teach is a Pope who is not helpful to the heart of the life of the church. A pope who does not teach is a pope who is not helpful to the heart of his ministry. The pope must teach, just as a bishop must teach, and a pastor and every priest and every parent and every faithful person. If they're not teaching, they're not faithful to the life of the faith they've been given.
Speaker 2:The Archbishop of Prague in Czechoslovakia during the time of Soviet occupation always said he presumed his house and his offices were bugged by the KGB. They, he presumed, were listening in on everything. When he asked about this, rather than complaining about a lack of privacy, which would have been foolish and a waste of time, he said it was an actual advantage for him. I always spoke so that those listening might have been converted. He said that's someone who understood his job. His first work was to teach Church.
Speaker 2:Teaching is the teaching of the church. When the question was broached about how the church could handle the concern of the integrity of the faith from generation to generation, the bishops of the church enunciated the doctrine that the pope, when teaching concerning faith and morals, was infallible. The teaching has to be about the faith, not some opinion about something else. It has to be the teaching of the church, not some novel idea the pope had last night, not some novel idea. The Pope had last night, and it has to be conformal with the substance and the content of the faith in continuity and communion with what has always been taught. In short, the Pope has the power to clarify and settle questions about teaching and interpretation, as well as to become a backstop to the controversies and opinions of the age, arising naturally from the challenges and circumstances of the time. Eventually, there has to be someone who can settle things, and it's the Pope who's entrusted to do this.
Speaker 2:When the bishops defined the doctrine that Vatican Council won, they were not unanimous in their points of view. Notably, there were those bishops who were not in favor of nailing down the definition of the work of the papal office. They preferred it remain more nebulous and more flexible, something like the British Constitution, which is unwritten, undefined and portable. The general opinion moved in the opposite direction. As it turned out, the definition of the pope's role has been helpful and restrictive. It's been good to define and corral the claims of the Pope and others who want to throw a blanket of papal authority over everything they like.
Speaker 2:The doctrine insists the Pope's teaching goes this far and no farther, which is a helpful corrective. Whoever the Pope is in, whatever age, his challenge is to teach the truths of the church. He is to help animate the church in its first work, which is to teach and pass on the life of Christ. When he does this, he's fulfilling his most important role, and when this is happening, he's bearing witness to the infallible teaching of the church. And a final story.
Speaker 2:There is a scene in Evelyn Waugh's novelideshead Revisited, that encapsulates the teaching. In the scene, one of the characters in the novel, max, is preparing to marry his Catholic fiancée. He's being instructed in the faith by a priest, but the lessons aren't going well. Frustrated, the priest confides that Max isn't very rigorous in his thinking. It's not that he's skeptical, it's that he just wants to get married and going to instruction classes is simply the tuition for getting what he wants. He's a difficult case, the priest says.
Speaker 2:For example, the other day we were talking about papal infallibility. I asked him if he believed in it and he told me that if I'm expected to believe in it, then I do. I asked him then what if the Pope came out on the balcony, looked up at the clouds and then said it's going to rain? Would it have to rain? And he said I suppose it would. And then I asked him but what if it didn't rain? Wouldn't the Pope be wrong? I thought I had him there, but then Max said well, I suppose it could sort of be spiritually raining, but we'd all be too sinful to see it. When he said that I gave up, I hope you get the joke.
Speaker 2:Papal infallibility doesn't mean that we must believe everything the Pope says about everything. Being Pope doesn't make him a particularly good meteorologist. He doesn't know any more about the weather than anyone else. Expand his comments to, I don't know, soccer championships, presidential elections, the quality of political candidates, the price of stock options, the efficacy of a legislature, the quality of Italian cars or the comfort of running shoes. Any comment the Pope would make about these matters would be only his opinion and nothing more. They'd be just his opinion.
Speaker 2:We believe the Pope as the one who embodies the gift of the church to live the life of Christ. That's the stole of authority laid over his shoulders. It's the gift he gives us. It's the gift that's given to the whole church. Back in just a moment. Welcome to our final segment, faith in Verse. We have a poem today called A Voice from the Past.
Speaker 2:I heard a stark, loud voice from the past speak to me in the whisper of a memory, just the briefest of moments, a simple flash of what had taken place. Then, suddenly, from a long time ago, years now gone by, the ripened fruit of fear fell upon me. I felt the freezing jolt again come nigh and could remember it all thoroughly For that briefest moment of time. There, my memory and my feelings were fused. This experience was precisely where it left off, as I was perplexed and bemused.
Speaker 2:So where, indeed, do we store what we recall? What is the specific place of memory? What is the specific place of memory After such time? Are we to be in thrall to what we can barely describe, much less see? Or is it true that we live not really in a steady, straightforward moving line, but revisit each event ceaselessly, unbothered by the passage of time, since we never leave what happens behind to abandon and move on? Finally, we should, to these moments, be more kind and look to be, of them all, ever free. That's a voice from the past. I hope that in the weeks to come, you can join us as we explore more about Living Catholic.
Speaker 1:Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcrorg.